The Problem of Trust

By Adam B. Seligman

The problem of trust in social relationships was central to the emergence of the modern form of civil society and much discussed by social and political philosophers of the early modern period. Over the past few years, in response to the profound changes associated with postmodernity, trust has returned to the attention of political scientists, sociologists, economists, and public policy analysts. In this sequel to his widely admired book, The Idea of Civil Society, Adam Seligman analyzes trust as a fundamental issue of our present social relationships. Setting his discussion in historical and intellectual context, Seligman asks whether trust--which many contemporary critics, from Robert Putnam through Francis Fukuyama, identify as essential in creating a cohesive society--can continue to serve this vital role.

Seligman traverses a wide range of examples, from the minutiae of everyday manners to central problems of political and economic life, showing throughout how civility and trust are being displaced in contemporary life by new "external' system constraints inimical to the development of trust. Disturbingly, Seligman shows that trust is losing its unifying power precisely because the individual, long assumed to be the ultimate repository of rights and values, is being reduced to a sum of group identities and an abstract matrix of rules. The irony for Seligman is that, in becoming postmodern, we seem to be moving backward to a premodern condition in which group sanctions rather than trust are the basis of group life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Release date: Jun 8, 2021
• ISBN: 9781400822379

Adam B. Seligman

Adam B. Seligman is Director of CEDAR and Professor of Religion at Boston University. Rahel R. Wasserfall is Director of Training and Evaluation for CEDAR and a resident scholar at the Women’s Studies Research Center at Brandeis University. David W. Montgomery is Director of Program Development for CEDAR.

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THE PROBLEM OF TRUST

THE PROBLEM OF TRUST

Adam B. Seligman

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY

Copyright © 1997 by Princeton University Press

Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street,

Princeton, New Jersey 08540

In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, Chichester, West Sussex

All Rights Reserved

Second printing, and first paperback printing, 2000

Paperback ISBN 0-691-05020-1

The Library of Congress has cataloged the cloth edition of this book as follows

Seligman, A.

The problem of trust / Adam B. Seligman

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-691-01242-3 (cl : alk. paper)

eISBN 978-1-40082-237-9 (ebook)

1. Social interaction. 2. Trust (Psychology) 3. Social role. I. Title.

HM291.S3952 1997 96-51589

302'. 17—dc21 CIP

R0

Contents __________________________________

Acknowledgments  vii

Introduction  3

PART ONE: THE PROBLEM OF TRUST  11

One

Trust, Role Segmentation, and Modernity  13

Two

Agency, Civility, and the Paradox of Solidarity  44

Three

Trust and Generalized Exchange  75

PART TWO: THE REPRESENTATION OF TRUST AND THE PRIVATE SPHERE  101

Four

Public and Private in Political Thought: Rousseau, Smith, and Some Contemporaries  103

Five

The Individual, the Rise of Conscience, and the Private Sphere: A Historical Interpretation of Agency and Strong Evaluations  124

Six

Spheres of Value and the Dilemma of Modernity  147

Conclusion  169

Notes  177

Bibliography  207

Index  225

Acknowledgments __________________________

I AM GRATEFUL to a number of people for their help in sorting out my ideas on trust and presenting them here in a coherent form. My greatest debt is perhaps to my students in the Sociology of Ideas seminar at the University of Colorado, Boulder, especially to Jay Watterworth, Taunya McGlochlin, and Carrie Foote-Ardah. All engaged me in a debate with these issues over a number of very fruitful years. In addition, John Holmwood read the entire manuscript (more than once) and provided extensive suggestions, comments, and encouragement. Robert Wuthnow and Dennis Wrong also provided helpful comments and saved me from making a number of embarrassing mistakes of fact and interpretation. A continuing, four-year debate with Mark Lichbach on the relative merits of rational choice theories as adequate explanations of social reality has provided a necessary background without which this book would probably not have been written.

The book draws on older discussions as well, and the analysis of otherhood and its transformation found in chapter two is drawn from material first prepared a decade ago in Jerusalem with Zali Gurevitz. Much of the argument presented in chapter four was first published as Animadversions upon Civil Society and Civic Virtue in the last Decade of the Twentieth Century in Civic Society: Theory, History, Comparison (Oxford: Polity Press, 1995), edited by John Hall, who pushed me, over the last few years, to think through these and other issues related to the problem of trust. More recent discussions and the opportunity to present some of the ideas developed here were offered by the Fundacion Manuel Garcia-Pelayo in Caracas and by the Institute for the Study of Economic Culture of Boston University and its Working Group on Civil Society and Civic Virtue, all of whose participants offered helpful comments on work then in progress. I also owe a special debt of gratitude to the Institute for the Study of Economic Culture for a generous research grant which supported work on this book during the 1995-96 academic year. That the Institute has subsequently offered itself to me as an intellectual home is itself an instructive example of the interweaving of system confidence and individual trust in the modern world. Finally, very special thanks to Carrie Foote-Ardah must again be recorded for her selfless help in the preparation of this manuscript for publication. For all errors, I alone must assume responsibility.

THE PROBLEM OF TRUST

Introduction _______________________________

SOME TIME ago Sir Ralf Dahrendorf published a trenchant and rather depressing essay on the growing uncoupling of economic well-being, social cohesion, and political freedom in Europe. It was a sobering study in the transformation of contemporary politics where in one form or another the interrelated nature of all three has been considered a Public Good of vital importance.¹ After all, the particular ideologies of political liberty characteristic of Western democracies—and however mediated in practice—have tended to encompass certain ideas of social cohesion and of economic wellbeing. So much is clear in T. H. Marshall’s famous conception of citizenship where the parsing out of citizen rights into their civic, political, and social components well illustrates both this status (as Public Goods) and their inherently interrelated nature. It may be recalled that more than forty years ago, Marshall distinguished between the political, civil, and social aspects of citizenship which he defined as follows: The civil element is composed of the rights necessary for individual freedom—liberty of person, freedom of speech, thought and faith, the right to own property and to conclude valid contracts, and the right to justice [that is] the right to defend and assert all one’s rights on term of equality with others and by due process of law. The political element comprises the right to participate in the exercise of political power as a member of the body invested with political authority or as an elector of the members of such body. And the social component includes the right to a modicum of economic welfare and security [and the] right to share to the full in the social heritage, and to live the life of a civilized being according to the standards prevailing in society.² The very articulation of these goods as rights, we might add, imbues them with the stature of Public Goods.

As Public Goods all are, moreover, derivative of a particular concept of the individual as standing at the core of the moral and political orders. This concept of the individual as, pace Emile Durkheim, something sacred and inviolable to others has served—within the modern West—as that principle of generalized exchange which structures the exchange of resources in society (mediating as it were the free flow of pure market exchange) in such ways as to create and provide for these very Public Goods.

The current crisis in which, as Dahrendorf suggests, more and more political actors are willing to sacrifice political freedom and/or social cohesion for the development of economic well-being is, essentially, a crisis in those principles of the Public Good which inform both the structuring of our economic life and the articulation of our politics, i.e., a crisis in the idea of the individual. Indeed, we need only to refer to the continuing debates between liberals and communitarians, between advocates of rights versus responsibilities, proponents of the radically situated as against the socially encumbered self to see how contested this idea of the individual is in our contemporary world. What we learn from Dahrendorf’s essay as well as from all structurally orientated sociological inquiry is that these debates are, to great extent, misplaced. For the issue is not ideological in nature, not tied to a principled advocacy of this or that idea of the individual however rooted in one’s moral epistemology. Rather, the issue is structural, that is to say, sociological in nature.

For the idea of the individual, if it is to serve as a principle of Public Good must, as Emile Durkheim noted long ago, structure our shared orientations to the phenomena of social life. Establishment of such a principle rests on the ability of social actors to impute, in Charles Taylor’s term, strong evaluations to one another (that is evaluations predicated on shared moral ideas). It is this mutual imputation that forms of the conscience collective of any society, thus permitting the establishment of that confidence among social actors which is necessary for the orderly progress of social, political, and even economic life. This ability to assume a shared set of moral evaluations, a familiarity not based on kinship, territorial proximity, or dense social networks, but rather a familiarity of strong evaluations was, for Durkheim, Marx, and other thinkers of the nineteenth century, predicated on the shared conditions of the division of labor. Hence the formation of a class für sich in the Marxian reading or the unique nature of modern organic solidarity with its sacred reading of the individual in Durkheimian sociology.

What Ralf Dahrendorf and other scholars are increasingly pointing to is the perceived and growing difficulty in maintaining the very principle of Public Goods in contemporary politics and the sense of commitment and responsibility to the Public Good that must, of necessity, go with it. We are increasingly, in Dahrendorf’s terminology, but shareholders rather than stakeholders in the myriad ventures of our life-world.³ Our commitments and responsibilities are short-term, market orientated, and private rather then long-term, generalized, and public.

Under such conditions it is well to query if either political liberty or social cohesion can indeed be maintained. As Dahrendorf notes, freedom and confidence go well together. In fact, I would argue that the existence of the latter is an indispensable condition for the former. Without confidence all contracts, promises, and obligations—whether economic, social, or political, public or private—can only be maintained by third-party enforcers. Without confidence all human relations are reduced to Prisoner Dilemma games (and even that iteration upon which confidence in PD games rests, is lacking). Without confidence the ability to articulate and maintain the very idea of a Public Good (let alone one defined in terms of the interconnection of political liberty and social cohesion) becomes highly suspect.

It is in this context that we must understand the recent resurgence of such concepts as civil society, associational life, and, most especially, trust, in recent years. The rise of these concepts in both the scholarly and more partisan literature can be attributed to an awareness (if still somewhat unfocused and not fully articulated) of the above-noted shifts in our social and moral consciousness and of a search to find a new way of expressing the very idea of the Public Good. All three concepts have after all reappeared with a daunting saliency as presumed conceptual solutions to some of the most pressing of social ills. These terms, in their very indeterminacy, have moreover been adopted by different political groups and by individuals with strikingly different political agendas who make of them what they will. The resultant wear and tear on the concepts is now being felt, perhaps most clearly in the case of civil society where its value as analytic concept or political slogan has declined in the countries of East Central Europe only to be picked up in the West and used to legitimize very different social programs and agendas; and it has entered academic discourse with a vengeance.

Interestingly, the idea of civil society is used by political groups and thinkers on both the right and the left, and though in Europe in general it is most often the province of the left, in the United States it has been appropriated by both groups to advance their political agendas. Thus, for right of center thinkers as well as for libertarian followers of Friedrich Hayek, the quest for civil society is taken to mean a mandate to deconstruct many of the powers of the State and replace them with intermediary institutions based on social voluntarism. For many liberals, civil society is identified with social movements, also existing beyond the State. And while many of the former refuse to recognize that voluntary organizations can be of a particularly nasty nature and based on primordial or ascriptive principles of membership and participation that put to shame the very foundations of any idea of civil society; the latter are blind to the fact that the Achilles heel of any social movement is its institutionalization, which—one way or the other—must be through the State and its legal (and coercive) apparatus. In the meantime both communitarians and liberals continue to assimilate the idea of civil society to their own terms, invest it with their own meanings, and make of it what they will. Right, Left, and Center; North, South, East, and West; civil society is identified with everything from multiparty systems and the rights of citizenship to individual voluntarism and the spirit of community.⁴ Indeed, it may not be too far from the truth to see the ever so much more recent resurgence of interest in trust and associational life as coming in the wake of a disillusionment with the term civil society. As more and more people came to use the self-same term to mean very different things, the concept lost its integrity and ultimately its scholarly use value, only to be replaced with a new set of terms whose fate may, ultimately, prove similar.

One possible way to avoid such confusion is to eschew all normative discussion of the above terms and approach them more analytically, to try then, in the case of civil society, to ascertain just what makes society civil, or even possible. And it is in this context that an understanding of the operation of trust in society is vital. For not only is trust necessary for the workings of society, but a specific form of generalized trust—rooted in modern individualist norms—is necessary for the workings of civil society. To call for the establishment of civil society without taking into consideration the fundamental terms of trust in society is but an empty exercise.

The very meaning of the term trust is itself problematic and often unscrutinzed. The trust existent between members of a relatively undifferentiated, tribal society would, one intuitively feels, be of a very different order than that bestowed (or withheld) among modern, contracting, market-oriented individuals, citizens of nation-states. Among these latter, the obligation to be trustworthy, and so to fulfill promises, arises from the moral agency and autonomy, from the freedom and responsibility, of the participants to the interaction. Moreover, without the prior existence of these conditions, rights really—to freedom, autonomy, and responsibility, the moral dimension of promise-keeping, and hence of trustworthiness— cannot be adequately explained. It is, in A. I. Meldon’s terms, the conferring of these prior rights that provides the warrant for the promise-keeping act.⁵ Here then we may see how the moral obligation to maintain trustworthiness is predicated on those social conditions—or rights—that make such promise-keeping possible.

If this is indeed the case then trust, at least as we know it, would in some sense be a modern phenomenon and not generalizable to all forms of social organization. Or perhaps it is only a particular form of trust that is modern. And if this is true, how are we to understand that freedom of the will and action which would seem both to necessitate some measure of trust in all social conditions and to define the human condition for time out of mind?

The seemingly (and I stress seemingly) philosophical nature of this problem should not be surprising since trust has traditionally been dealt with more by philosophers than social scientists. Among the latter, moreover, trust has tended to be explored mostly by social choice theorists (through the development of Prisoner Dilemma games) and large-scale survey literature (on trust in local and national governments, NATO, the UN, etc.) True, some earlier work by Niklas Luhmann and Diego Gambetta served to broaden our analytic understanding of the phenomenon (as did a host of anthropological literature on friendship).⁶ Yet it is only most recently in the writings of such scholars as Francis Fukuyama and Robert Putnam (and in a somewhat different vein, Anthony Giddens) that trust and its corollary, associational life, have reentered the field of analytic inquiry.⁷

As noted above, the use of the term trust, like the idea of civil society, tends to be loose and imprecise as it ranges from micro to macro encounters and is used to express ideas akin to Durkheim’s solidarity on the one hand and simple confidence in the iteration of interaction on the other. It is the combination of this imprecision in the scholarly use of the term together with an increased appreciation of just how central an understanding of trust must be to our analysis of different social formations and the changes they are undergoing at the close of the twentieth century (and as some would say the close of the modern era) that I have been led to the following inquiry. Thus, what this essay attempts is an understanding of trust as a discrete form of human interaction and an ideal model of communal life. In so doing it seeks to distinguish trust from such similar concepts as confidence, faith, and familiarity, and to attain some precision as to the social and historical conditions in which this form of interaction may emerge. Similarly, it explores the issues of public and private since it is within the perceived contradiction between them that the problem of trust is most often seen to reside.

In attempting to understand just what trust as a social fact may mean as well as its historical significance to modern forms of social life, especially in terms of its role in differentiating public from private spheres, I have had to return to the old and less than currently fashionable sociological concepts of role and role expectations. For those who view the structurally orientated nature of sociological analysis with a jaundiced, postmodern eye this mode of inquiry may well find little favor. Yet if we wish to avoid either the abstract moralizing of philosophy on the one hand or the rather simplistic psychological determinism of social choice theory on the other, we have little choice but to return to that structural view of society worked out in mid-century American sociology. The fundamental unit of that theoretical edifice was, as some of us may recall, the idea of social role as the position held by the social actor within the social division of labor. The nature of these roles, both analytically and empirically, have been debated and argued over by sociologists for decades. Indeed, as our own argument progresses, some of these different perceptions of role will play an important part in clarifying the social nature of trust. (An interested reader may already perceive that the concept of role gives us a terminology within which to discuss the fore-noted problem of the freedom of the will without recourse to either Augustinian theology or Kantian philosophy.)

In brief, the following argues that while some form of trust—or more properly confidence—among social actors is necessary for the continued operation of any social order (at any and all levels of differentiation), the issue of trust as a solution to a particular type of risk is a decidedly modern phenomenon, linked to the nature of the division of labor in modern, market economies. Thus, while the connection noted by Niklas Luhmann between trust and risk is accepted, I do not accept it as an ontological aspect of social existence.⁸ Eschewing any essentialist argument about trust (which has indeed characterized much of the relevant literature), I maintain that trust, as both a solution to and an articulation of a specific interactional problem, is tied to a particular idea of the self that we identify, most broadly, with modern social formations. I further argue that any attempt to generalize the problem of trust to human history tout court looses that specificity that alone explains its centrality in the construction of modern forms of social life.

To grasp the structural nature of trust as a phenomenon tied to modern forms of the division of labor, much use is made, as noted above, of the sociological category of role. Roles here are used as a heuristic device, as a type of analytical shorthand the better to grasp the structurally conditioned nature of trust and remove it from all philosophical abstraction or theological justification. This is, admittedly, a dangerous enterprise as, within the sociological tradition, roles carry their own essentialist and very dour view of the human person (a point addressed, if perhaps not adequately, in the following). Throughout the following analysis the concept of role will be used as no more than a convenient manner of expressing the fundamental unit within the division of labor. This is a minimalist reading which, it is hoped, will avoid some of the more outrageous uses of the concept within sociology. The idea of social roles has, after all, become infamous for the ahistorical nature of its employment and the rather truncated vision of human agency that it contains. However, rather than discard the idea entirely, I have felt it useful to try and keep the concept but to make use of it in an historical and relational mode without dragging in the metatheoretical presuppositions that so often adhere to the social-scientific use of the term. The extent of my success in this is ultimately for the reader to judge.

As opposed to other attempts in political theory, philosophy, and sociology to deal with the phenomenon of trust, this study approaches the concept both relationally, by setting it in the context of other cognate categories (confidence, faith, familiarity), and historically, by viewing it as an emergent property of human interaction, tied to a very specific form of social organization. In this, the current analysis attempts to move the study of trust to a wholly new and sounder ground. Avoiding the Scylla of rational-choice perspectives on trust (which are often but extended studies on the conditions of confidence in any interaction) and the Charybdis of a normative perspective (which would apotheosize trust as the conscience collective of society, i.e., some aspect of a collective mind), it attempts a structurally informed understanding of the historical conditions that saw the emergence of trust as a type (and model) of personal and social relations. To do this, argument moves to and from different levels: from the definitional to what may be termed the phenomenological, from micro to macro, and from economic principles of exchange to philosophies of self and society. My hope, however, is that precisely this weaving of different perspectives will allow us to grasp what has proved a most elusive and hitherto poorly treated concept.

Perhaps if we could grasp that which continually seems to elude us in this concept we could buttress our current vocabulary of membership and participation in the social realm, a vocabulary that seems increasingly inadequate as the century draws to a close. If indeed, as Dahrendorf has warned, we are approaching a growing dissociation of our ideas of social citizenship, individual freedom, and economic well-being, then too those conditions for modern forms of trust (rooted as we have noted in the rights, obligations, and liberties of citizenship) are also changing. In slightly different terms, with these changes we also stand to lose those very strong evaluations, those shared orientations to the phenomena of collective life that make the mutual bestowal of trust possible in the modern world. Perhaps the framing of these issues in terms of trust and the conditions (or better, preconditions) of its existence, rather than in terms of the more accepted vocabulary of political economy or public policy analysis, will alert us to just how much we stand to lose when those shared, strong evaluations of society are disregarded or ignored. In such circumstances the problems of risk, for which trust is a solution, can ever so quickly be transformed into problems of danger—for which trust, alas, can provide little assuagement.

The following is offered as a preliminary reflection on these concerns.

Part One ______________

THE PROBLEM OF TRUST

One __________________________

Trust, Role Segmentation, and Modernity

Introducing a Modern Problem

The existence of trust is an essential component of all enduring social relationships. As Talleyrand is reported to have said: You can do anything with bayonets except sit on them.

Power, dominance, and coercion can, in this reading, be a temporary solution to the problem of social order and the organization of the division of labor therein, but they will not in themselves provide the basis for the maintenance of said order over time. Such aspects of social organization as the structuring of the major markets in society (of power, prestige, and wealth), the construction and definition of the Public Good (and the myriad public goods of which it is constructed), and the rules and regulations for the public distribution of private goods rest, in all societies—from the premodern to the most postmodern—on some interplay of coercion and consent, of market and community, of instrumental and affective commitments and so also of the reigning definitions, boundaries, and extent of trust in society.¹

This insight has found its place as one of the fundamental concepts of sociology and sociological analysis. Indeed, from the nineteenth century and the theoretical insights of Emile Durkheim on the existence of a precontractual element in all social arrangements, the importance of trust to the existence of society has been recognized by many students of social life.

On the most general and abstract level it can be stated that the need for perduring, stable, and universally recognized structures of trust is rooted in the fundamental indeterminacy of social interaction. This indeterminacy, between social actors, between social actors and their goals, and between social actors and resources results in a basic unpredictability in social life notwithstanding the universality of human interdependence.² Consequently, any long-range attempt at constructing a social order and continuity of social frameworks of interaction must be predicated on the development of stable relations of mutual trust between social actors. Clearly, however, different forms of organizing society (on the macrosociological level) will bring in their wake different forms of establishing trust in society.

In this context one of the major arenas where the study of trust—on the interpersonal as well as the institutional level—has been central, has been in the study of modernization.³ Here, studies in the 1950s and 1960s concentrated on the establishment of new bases of trust in society centering on new terms of solidarity, of citizenship, and what were, in fact, new parameters defining the boundaries of trust in modernizing social structures.

This focus on the changing nature of trust in modernizing societies is indeed not surprising given the extraordinary importance of a universal basis of trust in modern, democratic societies. The emphasis in modern societies on consensus, the ideology of pragmatism, problem-solving, and technocratic expertise, as well as conflict management (as opposed to ideological fission), are all founded on an image of society based on interconnected networks of trust—among citizens, families, voluntary organizations, religious denominations, civic associations, and the like.⁴ Similarly the very legitimation of modern societies is founded on the trust of authority and of governments as generalizations of trust on the primary, interpersonal level. In fact, the primary venues of socialization, whether they be the educational system or the mass media, are oriented to the continuing inculcation of this value and what is in fact an ideology of trust in society. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the definitions of trust in Western industrialized and modern societies are rooted in the idea of the individual as final repository of rights and values. In these societies, it is the individual social actor, the citizen of the nation-state and not any collectively defined, primordial or corporate entity who is seen as at the foundation of the social order and around whom the terms of social trust are oriented.

The current concern with and revival of the idea of civil society, as essentially a clarion call to defining new terms of generalized trust in modern democratic societies, points to crises in those bases of trust that have defined the modern nation-state for the past two hundred years.⁵ Similarly, the continuing debates between communitarians and liberals over the terms of citizenship and the definition of the Public Good, as well as the seemingly irreparable chasm between normative and rational-choice theorists over their respective visions of the social order, all point to what seem to be fundamental problems (in theory as in practice) in the terms of generalized trust and the modes of its operation. Any solution to these problems must begin, however, with a clarification of terms, and the obvious place to begin is with an attempt to understand just what is meant by the term trust. This chapter is dedicated to an explication of that problem.

While there will be occasion to return again and again to the problematic connection between trust and modes of social organization, it may be wise, here at the outset, to note that an awareness of the problems of establishing generalized modes of social trust is as old as modernity itself. From the writings of Puffendorf and Grotius to those of John Locke, David Hume, and Immanuel Kant, the duty of promise-keeping, of honoring one’s declaration of will (decleratio, or signum voluntatis), becomes a central component of political theory.⁶ And, whereas for Grotius the obligation to fulfill promises was an element of natural law, for Kant the perfect duty of promise-keeping is what unites us in a moral community, is itself the woof and weave of those bonds of mutual respect between members of a moral community.⁷ Promise-keeping then is what allows the constitution of a moral community, in fact of society tout court. This attitude toward promise-keeping was as true for Locke as for Hume. And if for Locke grants, promises and oaths are bonds that hold the Almighty, for Hume they were but one of the three artifices of society, necessary for its constitution: no longer divine dictates, but nonetheless a rule-dependent or convention-dependent road to commitments beyond family and friends to those whom we bear no ‘real kindness.’ ⁸

What, however, is the early modern concern with promise-keeping if not a concern with establishing social bonds of trust in a society increasingly being defined by individual agents with interests and commitments of an increasingly personal nature? The breakup of local, territorial, and, crucially, primordial ties that accompanied Europe’s entry into the modern era engendered, as is well known, a new concern with redefining the nature of society.⁹ With the destruction of these bonds of primordial attachment to kith and kin, to territorial and local habitus, which had defined Western European societies until the Reformation, new forms of generalized trust had to be established. The early modern concern with promise-keeping must, I submit, be viewed in this light, as essentially an attempt to posit new bonds of generalized trust in societies where primordial attachments were no longer good to think with (to borrow a phrase from Claude Lévi-Strauss). The promise then is an act of will that invites trust among strangers, that is, among those who share no ties of affinity, kinship, or even shared belief. It is, as has